Rethinking the Firewall as a One-Way Mirror

Maybe he should be known for hanging China’s One-Way Mirror instead constructing its Great Firewall.

That’s the message Chinese Internet users are sending as the nation’s best-known censorship engineer, Fang Binxing, said he was retiring. Known as the father of China’s Great Firewall for helping develop tools that keep Internet users in the country from surfing websites available elsewhere, Mr. Fang is facing a fresh line of criticism in the wake of allegations by former U.S. defense contractor Edward Snowden that American intelligence agencies regularly compromised Chinese servers.

Reuters

A man visits a microblogging site in Shanghai.

“You only managed to guard against your own countrymen, but not the Americans,” said one commentator on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service. “Against Prism, this is our No. 1 hero?” said another, referring to the name of one U.S. spy system revealed by Mr. Snowden.

Their point: China engineered a system to block its citizens from seeing the outside world, but did too little to keep out the prying eyes of foreigners.

Long derided among Internet users, Mr. Fang is back in focus after abruptly announcing Thursday he would step down as president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

“I used to have a very healthy body,” 52-year-old Mr. Fang explained during a commencement address at the university. “I could easily swim freestyle 2,000 meters without a break. But I overused my body and didn’t take enough time to recover. I was seriously sick and I lost the ability to work overnight, and couldn’t bear the burden of both academia and management. This is the reason I submitted my resignation.”

The Harbin-born computer scientist is widely decorated by the Communist Party establishment for his work on Internet security, including proposing and organizing the construction of a national infrastructure network to secure information, according to his biography on the university website.

The censorship system, which has come to be known as the Great Firewall, blocks certain foreign Internet content from Chinese users. The world’s largest Internet population can’t see newspaper stories critical of China’s top leadership, details of abuse tracked by human rights groups and social networking sites like Facebook. An attempt to click through to that content returns a webpage error notice, such as “HTTP 404.”

Questions about the usefulness and relevance of the firewall are long running. Mr. Fang himself has been ridiculed as a hypocrite for admitting using software to “jump the firewall,” in the Chinese parlance, to read foreign Internet content.

Mr. Fang’s resignation announcement and health concerns were winning him little sympathy in cyberspace on Thursday. Instead, the news provided fresh excuses for more mocking. Many commentators on Weibo cited Mr. Snowden’s revelations that China is a regular target of U.S. Internet prying.

In recent days, before Mr. Fang’s resignation, some Internet commentators wondered whether he used some U.S. telecommunications equipment in building the firewall and whether such items made Chinese serves vulnerable to U.S. intelligence gathering.

In May, Mr. Fang betrayed no hint of leaving when he discussed his hopes about how his university might modernize itself after moving to a new campus. He said the school should pursue more goal-oriented instruction in order to spark innovation, instead of teaching students to follow established principles, according to a summary of his comments.

The firewall is arguably no longer China’s most important Internet control. Beijing’s concern today is homegrown Internet activity, not the so-called foreign “spiritual pollution” the controls were originally designed to make invisible to Chinese citizens.

“The Great Firewall is an obvious problem for foreign Internet ﬁrms, and for the Chinese people interacting with others outside of China on these services, but it does little to limit the expressive power of Chinese people who can ﬁnd other sites to express themselves in similar ways,” says a new study from researchers at Harvard University. “The most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented,” the authors say, is now aimed at stifling “social mobilization” inside the wall.

As Mr. Fang steps away from the spotlight to widespread derision on the Internet in China, we recall an episode a half-century ago, when TV was the seemingly uncontrollable new medium. In 1962, then California gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon told U.S. media he would go:

“You’ve had a lot of fun, a lot of fun,” said Mr. Nixon. “You’ve had an opportunity to attack me, and I think I’ve given as good as I’ve taken. I leave you gentlemen now. And you will now write it. You will now interpret it. That’s your right. But as I leave you, I want you to know, just think of how much you’re going to be missing. You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

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